We are celebrating! Tusquets Editores celebrates 50 years. Half a century full of excellence, with a catalog composed of reference writers and undoubted literary quality. Among them we find Almudena Grandes, to Fernando Aramburu, to Haruki Murakami, to John Conolly, to Samuel Beckett, to Luis Landero, to Leonardo Padura, to Arthur Miller or to Milan Kundera. And the list continues with many more, all bright pen.
From PlanetadeLibros we want to celebrate these fantastic 50 years by sharing with our readers how were the beginnings of the emblematic Barcelona publishing house. Do you want to find out?
It all started in 1969, when Beatriz de Moura Y Oscar Tusquets They founded one of the most exquisite and effervescent publishers of the moment, seeking to accommodate small reference books that did not want to publish any label. Thus, in an apartment of 60 square meters and with an investment of 165,000 pesetas (about € 1,500), the first two Tusquets collections were born, Intimate Notebooks Y Marginal Notebooks.
Not everything has been a path of roses: just one year after opening, the publishing house was not going through a good economic time. But the generosity of a friend got him afloat. This friend was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, thanks to whom the publisher managed to stay. Gabo present Story of a castaway to the seal: an excellent 82-page journalistic report on the wreck of a ship in the Caribbean Sea. It was an immediate success, and it continues to this day. Since then, the Tusquets catalog has not stopped growing, with more than 3,000 titles and 300 authors. Homeland, Icy heart, Tokyo Blues, The lover… Magnificent titles that fill our shelves and that have formed us as readers.
And, what better than the first-person experience of a Tusquets author to know the ins and outs of the label? We leave you with this great text Leonardo Padura, about these shared years.
Congratulations, Tusquets!
Being a writer, from Tusquets, with Tusquets
LEONARDO PADURAIt was on January 13, 1996 when I received the first call from the two that changed my life as a writer and … almost all my life. With that first call they announce to me that, with three months of delay and after I consider myself lost, I was awarded the Café Gijón Novel Prize of 1995 for my work More expensive. Noooo …!
Two months later the other call came, the definitive one, the overweight one, the one that was never expected and that changed my professional life seriously. Who sought me from Spain was nothing more and nothing less than Mrs. Beatriz de Moura, the mythical founder of Tusquets Editores, who told me that, on the recommendation of two of the jurors of the Café Gijón Prize, it had been read More expensive and I was willing to edit my novel … if I agreed. Publish with Tusquets? The publishing house that published Milan Kundera, John Irving, Leonardo Sciascia, Jorge Semprún? What if I wanted … How the fuck he wasn't going to want!
In those moments of 1996 I had already decided to become a professional writer and had left my work in an important Cuban cultural magazine. I had four written novels, three of them starring my Mario Conde character, including More expensive, but I do not appear as an editor in the Cuba of the Special Period of the 1990s or in the entire planetary horizon, which for many writers is usually wide and too foreign. And Beatriz asked me if I wanted to!
Another three months later, accompanied by my eternal Lucia, I entered the house on Iradier Street in Barcelona where the offices of the prestigious publishing house were then and I had my first conversations with Antonio López Lamadrid and with Beatriz de Moura, the drivers of one of the most notable editorial projects in Spanish language of these last fifty years. And it was when I left those personal meetings, to see how they talked to me and treated me, what things they proposed to me, that Lucia, who sometimes speaks with sentences, as if she were a character from García Márquez, told me:
– Now you are a writer.
And I have been for twenty-three years with Tusquets and thanks to Tusquets. Since then this publishing house that has already published fourteen of my books, including novels, stories, essays and even screenplays, has been my home and my snail, my pedestal and my challenge. Accompanied by Tusquets I have done my writing career outside of Cuba and, in rebound, also in Cuba, I have done it in Spanish and translated into almost three dozen languages, assuming the challenge of belonging to a house in which the most important Value of your catalog is the quality of its authors and published works. Thanks to the editions and work of Tusquets agency, with Alejandra Segrelles, I have won awards that I never dreamed of touching in Spain, Mexico, France, Italy, Greece …
Because with Tusquets I have grown as a Writer. Working with its editors, from Beatriz herself to her current director Juan Cerezo, through the hands of professionals such as Ana Estevan, Josep Maria Ventosa and Cristina Sánchez, has been the best possible school for an author published by an editorial of excellence in that the Writer always aspires to bring to light the best novel that he is capable of achieving and not the easiest one to find. In which, when a work is discussed, only its projections and literary conditions are discussed, and never the annexes (political circumstances, market possibilities). An editorial in which they repeat to you that the important one is you, the Writer, until they make you believe it and act as such.
Having shared for almost three years almost half of the generous history of Tusquets Editores constitutes one of my literary pride and one of my great human rewards, it has been an essential part of my professional life and, as I said, almost all my life since those Initial months of 1996 when I received two strong phone calls and, as I always say, although I am an atheist, I was fortunate (and certified) that God's long finger touched my forehead.
Mantilla, May 28, 2019